this time Christianity was too strong. It had come to count nobles and rulers in its ranks. At the opening of the fourth century A.D., the keen Constantine saw the advantage to be gained by enlisting this force upon his side in the civil wars, and the era of persecution by the pagans ceased forever.

510. Summary. (a) The persecution of the Church by the best emperors becomes explicable. (b) It was not of such a character as to seriously endanger a vital faith. (c) It did give rise to multitudes of heroic martyrdoms of strong men and weak maidens, which make a glorious page in human history, and which by their effect upon contemporaries justify the saying, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." (d) The moral results of Christianity were so far most apparent in the social life of the lower classes in the cities. The effect upon legislation and government was to begin in the fourth century A.D.

FOR FURTHER READING ON THE PERSECUTIONS. - There are a few excellent pages on the persecution by good emperors in Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism, First Series (essay on Marcus Aurelius), 359-363. The causes and extent of persecution are summarized in Ramsay, ch. xv.; chs. x.-xiv. give its history in the first two centuries. The attitude of the imperial government is discussed in Watson's Aurelius, ch. vii.; Capes' Antonines, ch. vi.; Carr, ch. ii.; Ulhorn, 282-297. A lengthy treatment will be found in Milman, bk. ii. ch. ix., and in Lecky, I. 398-468. A valuable brief statement in Curteis' Roman Empire, 20–30. See also Church's To the Lions and Newman's Callista (novels).

V. THE THIRD CENTURY-GENERAL DECLINE.2

511. Renewal of Barbarian Attacks. For two centuries the task of the legions had been comparatively easy, but in the reign of the peaceful Marcus Aurelius the torrent of barbarian

1 Special report: stories of famous early martyrs; the persecutions of Decius and of Diocletian.

2 Most of the preceding topics in this chapter have been treated only to about 200 A.D. In some cases- imperial organization, lists of emperors, and Christianity - it was more convenient to cover the three centuries.

invasion began to beat again upon the ramparts of civilization. The Moorish tribes were on the move in Africa; the Parthians, whom Trajan had humbled, again menaced the Euphrates; and Tartars, Slavs, Finns, and Germans burst upon the Danube. Aurelius gave the years of his reign to campaigns on the frontier. For the time, indeed, Rome beat off the attack; but from this date she stood always on the defensive, with exhaustless swarms of fresh enemies ever surging about her defenses; and after the great and prosperous reigns of Septimius and Alexander Severus (§ 461) they began to burst through for destructive raids. Early in the third century the Parthian Empire dissolved, only to give way to a more formidable renewed Persian kingdom under the Sassanidae kings. This power for a time seemed the great danger. In 250 and 260 A.D., the Persians poured across the Euphrates. The emperor Valerian was defeated and taken prisoner, and Antioch was captured. New German tribes, too, the mightier foe, as events were to prove, had appeared on the European frontier: the Alemanni crossed the Rhine and maintained themselves in Gaul for two years (236-238 A.D.); in the disorders of the fifties, bands of Franks swept over Gaul and Spain; the Goths seized the province of Dacia, and raided the eastern European provinces. In the sixties, Gothic fleets, of five hundred sail, issuing. from the Black Sea, ravaged the Mediterranean coasts, sacking Athens, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta. Claudius II. and Aurelian, however, restored the old frontiers, except for Dacia, and chastised the barbarians on all sides, and the worst of this evil was confined to the middle third of the century; fatal blow had been struck at the prestige of Rome.

but a

512. Political Decline. The "barrack emperors of the third century" (§ 461) is the general name given by Hodgkin to

1 Chapters of the Thoughts were composed, as the date lines show, in camp in the mountains of Bohemia or Moravia against the Marcomanni (Markmen) and Quadi.

2 Read a few pages in Hodgkin, I. 44-71.

the twenty-five rulers of this ninety years from Commodus to Diocletian. They were set up by the army, and all but four died by revolt (two of these four in war against Goths and Persians). The imperial power had become the sport and spoil of the legions, except for brief intervals when some strong ruler chanced to grasp the scepter. Sometimes the throne was actually auctioned to the highest bidder. In the sixties the Empire seemed to have split finally into petty fragments. But the age proved finally to have been only one of transition; in the next century, as we shall see, Diocletian and Constantine were to remove the causes of internal disorder and to introduce another long period of political calm.

513. Decline of Population and of Material Prosperity. — By the irony of fate, the reign of the best of emperors marks also another great calamity. In the year 166 a new Asiatic plague swept from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, carrying off, we are told, half the population.

From Aurelius to Aurelian, at brief intervals, the pestilence returned, to leave wide regions desolate and to demoralize industry and society. Those who recovered from the disease. often showed a weakened energy, and the vitality of the Empire was fatally lowered. It takes vigorous, young societies a long time to recover from a single blow of this kind;' to the Roman Empire, the disaster was the more deadly because population had already become stationary, if it was not even on the decline.

The reasons for this are not altogether clear. The widespread slave system was no doubt one cause. The high standard of comfort, and consequent dislike for large families, as in modern France, was another. But these seem insufficient. It is hardly possible to charge the evil to immorality on a large scale, since the victory of Christianity does not seem to have checked it. Whatever the cause, the fact is beyond ques

1 It is said to have taken a century for England to recover from the effects of the Black Death in the thirteenth century.

tion; and so the gaps left by the pestilence remained unfilled. The fatal disease of the later Empire was want of men.1

514. Decay in Literature. — Great names in poetry, history, and science cease. Literature is no longer creative. Philosophy and theology become a dreary waste of controversy. We have multitudes of "Apologies" for Christianity from the Church Fathers (Lactantius, Tertullian, and Origen-all in Africa), and volume upon volume against them from the New Platonists, like Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry (Asiatics). Works on Christian doctrine and practice were written also by St. Clement (Alexandria) and St. Cyprian (Carthage).

The one advance is in Roman law (§ 500). This is the age of the great jurists, of whom Ulpian is the most famous.

515. General Summary.—At the same time, the century had many bright spots; and indeed the first third was, on the whole, one of the happy periods in human history. The gentle Alexander Severus in particular restored the glories of the age of the Antonines. But after his murder by the rebellious legions, for the second third of the century, society as well as government seemed on the point of dissolution, as in the first century B.C. The soldier-emperor Aurelian (270-275 A.D.) restored order while his strong hand held authority, and, ten years later, Diocletian began the reforms that were to save society for two hundred years more.

Sources:

REFERENCES for the Empire of the first three centuries. Augustus' Monumentum Ancyranum ("The Deeds of Augustus ") is important for the reign of the first emperor; it is a long inscription found on the walls of a temple in Ancyra, copied from a tablet set up by Augustus at Rome; translation in Pennsylvania Reprints, V. Tacitus covers the early period. Suetonius gives us the Lives of the first twelve Caesars. MODERN AUTHORITIES. General survey: Capes' Early Empire and The Age of the Antonines (Epochs) and Bury's Roman Empire (Student's

1 Read Seeley's Roman Imperialism, 53–64.

2 Special report; see Gibbon, in particular.

Series), to 180 A.D., fill the period between Mommsen and Gibbon. Gibbon (chs. iv.-xii.) remains the great guide for the third century. Pelham covers the whole period in brief. Merivale's seven volumes on The Romans under the Empire may be consulted; vols. iii.-vii. cover the ground from Mommsen to Gibbon. The third century is not attractive, and writers on the Early Empire show a disposition to stop with the Antonines, while treatments of the later period usually begin with Diocletian. Hodgkin, I. 5-16, has an excellent summary from Augustus to Diocletian.

On society Inge, Society in Rome; Lecky, European Morals, chs. ii. iii. (for advanced students); Thomas, Roman Life.

On Christianity: All the authorities above and those given at the close of Division III. Advanced students will find matter in Fisher, Milman, Ramsay, Hardy, Alzog, Sheldon, and Renan.